FXAA 4.0 in prototyping stage

FXAA is an effective, performance-light form of anti-aliasing developed by NVIDIA's Timothy Lottes, and has been featured in games like Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City. Lottes is currently working on a fourth version of the technology, and has detailed it today on his blog.

(Left image is standard bilinear with 3/2x in width and height, right image is FXAA 4.0 with 3/2x in width and height)

FXAA 4 is described as "a combination of a demosaicing/deinterleaving, super-resolution, and anti-aliasing algorithm all in one tiny full screen pass." Its goals are as follows:

1. Aid in the support of film quality visuals for games. 2. Ultra high quality/cost anti-aliasing. 3. Decouple rendering resolution from display resolution.

FXAA can also be used in older games, such as Duke Nukem 3D, and with surprising results. As you can see below, the image where FXAA 4 is enabled has a considerably smoother image quality, but there is also a slight decrease in the overall sharpness.

(Left Image; no AA, right image; FXAA 4)

The results of FXAA continue to improve and the latest prototype is showing promising results. We are looking forward to seeing FXAA 4 in future games, but for the time being, you can click the source to see more images of it in action.

Interesting stuff... I've not ever used anti aliasing, my computer is too slow for the mostly ignorable rough edges. But I can see the benefit of this kinda stuff for future video games, and when I get myself a better compooter.

I like FXAA in Skyrim. It's an acquired taste though to some it's just blurry to others such as myself it's more cinematic and true to life. I find the likes of MSAA make images too crisp and to be honest nothing in this world look like that to the human eye.

Yeah The Witcher 2 is one of those games that has beastly computer requirements but displays on screen the very reason why. At times I question why Skyrim asks for such high specs for the higher graphics options when it looks like an Oblivion mod at times.